I’ve been setting up categories of words and phrases so I can practice them intensively/exclusively. Use them as forms, try to integrate them into my casual conversation, recognize them instinctively, etc. I’ve done this by using special characters which I can serach for, e.g: @#$%^&+. That’s nice. With those categories I see I can pull up ALL words or phrases which meet a particular category for extensive practice – that seems to work.
The problem is that when I start practicing from those long lists, say 300 selected phrases, I can only do a max of 25 words or phrases before I come back to the prompt . . . and selecting another 25 words puts me back into the default queue instead of letting me proceed with the other 275 I also want to practice. Can you please prioritize fixing this BUG?
A couple of features I would also find very helpful in my practice (and everyone else would, also, if they were practicing learning how to speak) are:
(1) A dedicated, easily reachable single key to request pronunciation. This would allow me to replay the same word or phrase over and over again so I can practice hearing it and practice my pronunciation. Right now I have to click. And click. And click. And…well, this is just something which should be keystroke easy. And it would be trivial to implement, yes?
(2) This next feature would be harder, no doubt, but I’m going to suggest it anyway. To recognize common sub-phrases /idioms within longer practice card phrases it would be really nice to be able to italicize characters. Right now I am using all manner of tricks, like embedding/capitalizing certain words like “QUE”, or …" so I can see the start and end of the idiom reflexively. Ability to type in italics would be much nicer and shouldn’t affect any of the other features, or would it? Just a nice touch I thought I would suggest.
Thank you for your consideration (and hopefully a fast track fix for the bug)!
That’s an inventive way to categorize words. I’m afraid I wouldn’t describe it as a bug though since it sounds like the system is behaving as designed. Each session is a maximum of 25 words/phrases, and if you start a new flashcard session from the Practice tab there’s no way to filter by words containing certain characters. Right now the only way you can prioritize learning of certain words is by starring (favoriting) them which will make the spaced repetition scheduling algorithm prfioritize them above the rest.
I’ll take the feedback on board though and will consider more fine grained categorization (beyond just starring words) in future. (No promises)
Hi Steve. Probably “me bad” for using the word “bug”. But it’s hard for me to see it as a “feature” (except under the old hacker rules, of 50 years ago, where all undesired oddities a luser encounters are actually labelled “features” so they go away;-).
But you added – as a clear feature of the Word List tab – the ability to generate lists and to begin to practice them, specifically.
(1) There are SIX common-sensical sort categories, which generally produce lists far longer than 25 words.
(2) There is a Checkbox to the left of the Actions tab which it is suggested I click to see all the words in that category. I just checked it for my list under the category of “Usefulness/frequency” and it said: “All 25 words on this page are selected.
(3) It SUGGESTS I may want the full list, and tells me to click if I want that choice, I do, so I get " All 29832 words are selected. Clear Selection”. And, sure enough, I can page to the next page and next page…and then I can page back to the first.
(4) Now, under the Actions Tab, I have three choices: Delete, Export, Practice Flashcards.
That is clearly an intended feature – and a good one. So, “Practice Flashcards WORKS”. I gives me 25 flashcards. I get to the end of those, intending to go on to work more of this “Useful/Frequency” list of words…and I CAN’T.
I CAN’T? I don’t believe that was your intention, when you went to the considerable trouble of adding subsorted lists. FWIW, I want to give you considerable credit for adding the WORD LIST tab, and all its functionality. Now I just want to use that functionality to practice the words and phrases which I think I need to prioritize.
And I can’t. And it seems to be because of the totally arbitrary 25 words at a time chunk size limit? Is that what you intended? If not, it is a bug. Or, at least, we would have called it a bug back when I was programming in 1980 (although we might have joked about it being a “feature for lusers” ;-}
I agree that practicing from specific lists would be a nice feature. Will bear this in mind.
I also agree that the Practice Flashcards option from the Word List feels a bit half baked right now. But there are a lot of other half baked areas of the product and ideas for improvements that feel like they need attention too, and I can’t do them all.
The WordList feature was a brilliant idea from the start. A lesser programmer or lesser program wouldn’t have included anything so potentially hugely empowering. And, as you have tweaked features in WordList to better support suggestions, it has become a lot more than “half baked”.
E.g., adding the “recently practiced” choice to the list of subsorts added an immense amount of power which I use constantly, many times every day. Once upon a time I asked for a “back” button. Adding “Recently practiced” in the WordList search took care of that need, and more. I think someone recently, independently, requested a “back” button? They have something equivalent, and potentially a lot more powerful, in the “Recently practiced” subsort. Except they get to see ALL the recent practiced words, which I find gives even greater context for review, edit, and deeper study. The recent new feature to add a detailed Note, goes along with that, to amplify my ability to add, and adjust, mnemonics and categorization.
I also use the WordList to add custom flashcards to really stretch variations, combinations, other tenses, and even grammar/sentence construction. With huge amounts of flexibility to focus my custom cards on MY specific weak points and needs. (E.g. I’ve added, or created, a lot of “tongue twisters” to help me practice aspects of diction; I’ve also been able to add various sorts of lists to practice, in context, synonyms, near-homonyms (which can confuse me), etc.
Many of the features you have added or slightly adjusted, generally to support other things you had already laid the ground-work for in earlier work, can be stacked and – as I’ve discovered myself – used to address more than a few of the “new feature requests” ahora mismo! Increasingly, it turns out that the code to meet a use case is actually already there, or almost there – when combined with knowledge of other features you have incrementally added (e.g., ability to Edit a word being one click away, while practicing).
I once complained about unusual characters, confusing, or breaking, the the search function. You corrected that and that small adjustment laid the whole foundation for my “meta” use of those special characters as extraordinarily flexible “categories”. (Next step is maybe a little GREP!)
Anyway, although I continue to make feature requests, I know you have a lot of users and even a “simple” adjustment can probably add hours. But I would NOT, any longer, call the WordList “half baked”. It is much closer to fully baked – and on the verge of becoming mind-blowingly powerful – because you, obviously, made an amazing number of wise design choices, at the beginning, and small adjustments along the way, which a lesser programmer would have skipped or never planned for.
If you go back two years or so, I was the user complaining that I had, like, 50K words in the traditional flash-card queue and no way to even hope to make a dent in them. That was hugely demotivating. So I never got anywhere with the flashcards. (And, no, I don’t use Anki, either, nor any of the other flashcard features I have in many other apps, because they are nearly all so stubborn in their interface or inflexible to my preferences and needs. And I just couldn’t see any point in trying to empty an ocean with a thimble.
And then you added to my anguish when you stuck in daily “nudge” (on top of all the other nudges I was getting from other apps, my dentist, etc.).
And THEN you added “Blitz” mode – and everything changed! And then you slightly improved it. And then, again. And again. And I don’t think (certainly hope not) you had too do too much rework, because you’d made so many of the flexiblity choices early on. (Else I don’t know how you could possibly be so effective in making the thousands of small-chunk changes which have happened over the last few years, I really don’t.)
Anyway, I just want to say that I don’t see much of anything, anymore, which is “half baked”. Maybe a few things that are 95% baked. But mostly I just see ReadLang successfully being stretched and expanded way outside its seeming original use case!
Thank you, as always, for your consideration. Almost by the day I can tell I am improving, now, in my ability to read, hear, and – increasingly – speak Spanish. That has been a long road for me, but I seemed to be making no useful progress until I started increasingly using readlang…because I increasingly could measure my progress by the metrics which mattered to me.
Amazing creation. Amazing creator! And I would know.